The university: new directions

Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, there has been a historically unprecedented growth in the volume of commodities and associated development of technology. This phenomenon that has been conflated with the idea of "progress" has now brought the world to a point where life itself is threatened by the danger of environmental catastrophe or nuclear war. What kind of mind has brought things to such a pass? It is time to examine the epistemology that has emerged in the West since the 17th century and the neural structures that are associated with the contemporary thought process.

There is a twofold challenge for universities across the world: first, to develop a critical understanding of the framework within which truths have been established over the last four centuries. Second, to nurture a humane consciousness as a vital element of education. The dialectic of the Enlightenment in the 17th century was that a wide range of misconceptions were laid to rest on the basis of observation and experiment. This new paradigm of knowledge created the possibility of overcoming scarcity and building a humane society. But the great possibilities that modern science and technology opened up were accompanied by a mode of knowing the world that shifted the mental balance of the human community. The sense of relatedness and the impulse of human solidarity was suppressed, while aggression was over developed in the human psyche (Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, David Laing, Iain McGilchrist, Seyyed Hossein Nasr). This was a key factor in reinforcing destructiveness as the dominant element in the modern Western mind.

As I have argued in my latest book, the new epistemology that defined post-enlightenment science was propounded initially by Descartes and Galileo in different ways. It involved three main propositions.

First, the only reality is the material world that can be comprehended through observation and measurement. A defining feature of this methodology is the assumption that what is being observed does not change in the act of observation. This is the concept of "objectivity", or the divorce between subject and object.

Second, the only way of understanding reality is to break down matter into its component elements, understand each element in turn and then aggregate the information about the elements into a knowledge of the whole. This approach has been called Reductive Materialism. It systematically excludes the possibility of a knowledge of the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, it is a wholeness that is meaningful only in its totality and cannot be divided into parts. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr has pointed out, a flower is beautiful only in its wholeness. Half a flower is not a flower at all.

Third, in the course of Western civilisation, a conviction took root that through the materialist mode of knowing, we could understand everything. As Iain McGilchrist, the distinguished neuro scientist and philosopher has observed, once we believe that we can understand everything, the chances of knowing anything at all are remote. A related belief that was to endanger the long-term existence of humans was that we could control the world. The idea of control began to feed individual and national egos. Despite the dominance of the materialist epistemology, the experiential mode of knowing the world remains, even if at the margins of our consciousness. There are fundamental creative insights, which most of us share, and in terms of which we experience our humanness. We regard them to be real or self-evident, even though within the materialist paradigm, they are not considered real: for example, the experience of love, beauty, goodness. Human beings have apprehended these transcendent experiences of the aesthetic or spiritual realm, and expressed them throughout recorded history, in art, literature, forms of social life, and religious rituals.

I've suggested in my recent book, that in the perennial wisdom tradition, right up to the contemporary period, scholars (Muhammad Iqbal, Hossein Nasr, Martin Lings) and some scientists (Rupert Sheldrake, Wolfgang Smith, Iain McGilchrist) have argued that human beings have an inherent faculty of experiencing the transcendent. One way in which this faculty is manifested is what can be called heart knowledge. See chapter 12 of my book. The heart, as Dr Martin Lings observed, in both the Western and Eastern intellectual traditions is not just the organ by that name but the instrument of experiencing the transcendent. The term heart has been used synonymously with the word intellect in the Medieval period. (Latin Intellectus, which means the instrument of experiencing the transcendent). The modern Western thought process is associated with certain specific neural structures in the brain. McGilchrist, in his book The Master and the Emissary, and his recent landmark two-volume study, The Matter with Things, has shown that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the human brain have quite different functions. The left hemisphere is analytical, and has a narrow beam focus. The right hemisphere, by contrast, gives the bigger picture; an awareness of the whole. Both hemispheres need to operate in balance. It can be argued that the right hemisphere can enable the experience of the transcendent truths that lie beyond material reality. Over the last four centuries or so, the left hemisphere has been overdeveloped with the atomisation of society, and the aggressive ego-driven impulse to accumulate commodities holding sway. At the same time, the right hemisphere has not been brought in to play adequately, leading to an imbalance in the psyche. The aggressive impulse has begun to dominate our consciousness, while the impulse of compassion and the sense of relatedness which leads to human solidarity has been lying dormant. If life is to be sustained, it is necessary that we restore a balance in our consciousness by accessing our capacity for compassion, a sense of responsibility towards others, and to the natural world. Love and beauty should be re-experienced and the sense of relatedness that they enable ought to be made conscious.

The root of the word education is edu-cere, which means bringing to the surface that which is dormant in us. For this, education should be reorganised to enable both the development of our analytical ability and inculcating a humane sensibility. Such education is important not only to build a career, but to survive as a species and build a better world.